Naskhī script

Naskhī script, Islāmic style of handwritten alphabet developed in the 4th century of the Islāmic era (i.e., the 10th century ad). From the beginning of Islāmic writing, two kinds of scripts existed side by side—those used for everyday correspondence and business and those used for copying the Qurʾān. Naskhī script is a cursive style developed from the earliest everyday business scripts. It has remained perhaps the most popular script in the Arab world.

Naskhī is a legible, stately script with emphasis on a horizontal line and on the proportions between letters. The two names associated with its development are Ibn Muqlah (d. 940) and Ibn al-Bawwāb (d. 1022 or 1031), both of whom worked in Mesopotamia. A Qurʾān manuscript of Ibn al-Bawwāb is in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. From the 11th century ad, naskhī was widely used for copying the Qurʾān.

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886 Baghdad [now in Iraq] 940 Baghdad one of the foremost calligraphers of the ʿAbbāsid Age (750–1258), reputed inventor of the first cursive style of Arabic lettering, the naskhī script, which replaced the angular Kūfic as the standard of Islamic calligraphy. In...

10th century Iraq 1022 or 1031 Baghdad Arabic calligrapher of the ʿAbbāsid Age (750–1258) who reputedly invented the cursive rayḥānī and muḥaqqaq scripts. He refined several of the calligraphic styles invented a century earlier by Ibn Muqlah,...

...contrasting with those scripts that superseded it. About 1000 a new script was established and came to be used for copying the Qurʾān. This is the so-called naskhī script, which has remained perhaps the most popular script in the Arab world. It is a cursive script based on certain laws governing the proportions between the letters. The...